When Saab Aircraft was about to build its new IT platform last summer, the company's first thought was to upgrade to Microsoft® Windows NT® 4.0. However, after a highly successful test run of the beta 3 version of the Windows® 2000 operating system, they decided to move directly to the new operating system to avoid an upgrade and to gain immediate access to the new features of Windows 2000.
Customer Profile
Saab Aircraft AB, based in Linkõping, Sweden, handles customer support, service, and development for the Saab 340 and Saab 2000 civil aircraft models. With more than 500 airplanes in operation, the company employs some 420 people in Sweden and the United States. Saab aircraft has installed Microsoft® Windows® 2000 on its 330 workstations and nine servers with the help of Swedish IT services firm Alfaskop.
Through its new network, Saab is opening up more to its customers, partners, and suppliers, and to its subsidiary in the United States, which this spring will install an IT environment corresponding to the one in Linkõping. The companies will then be able to integrate their respective solutions, including replication of Exchange servers, divided databases, and so on.
Saab Aircraft AB is responsible for customer service, service, and development of the Saab 340 and Saab 2000 civil aircraft models. Saab Aircraft has had a desire to open itself up more to the outside world for some time—to its customers, partners, and suppliers. This was also the thinking behind their new IT environment. "We built up a completely new network during the fall of 1999. This included faster transport, new servers, upgraded workstations, and a new operating system," says Christer Nordlander, IT manager at Saab Aircraft. "However, we don't like to rush into purchases. Step one was, as usual, a preliminary study, which we completed in March of 1999."
Preliminary Study Looked at Windows NT 4.0
"In our preliminary study we decided to go with a Microsoft platform, including Microsoft Office 2000, Outlook®, and Exchange. We decided on Windows NT 4.0 as our operating system for both servers and workstations," says Nordlander. "But then we began to wonder whether we should make the move directly to Windows 2000, both to avoid having to upgrade a short time later and to gain access to all the new functions in one step," says Nordlander. No sooner said than done. In August 1999, in cooperation with Swedish IT services firm Alfaskop, they tested Windows 2000 beta 3 on both servers and workstations. "We found that it worked exceptionally well, even better than our previous workstation environment, Windows 95! And so we decided to go with Windows 2000," Nordlander reports.
Program Installation a Major Improvement
They set to work. The network was upgraded to 100 megabits per second for each individual workstation. The workstation hardware was upgraded, either by making replacements (for Pentium 100s and 133s, as well as some 40 X-terminals), or by adding 64 megabytes of internal memory (for other workstations). Then they installed and configured Windows 2000—which had reached Release Candidate 2 by this time—Microsoft Office 2000, and Microsoft Exchange on their 330 workstations and nine servers. "We gained a great deal by choosing Windows 2000," says Nordlander. "I can see the benefits in a number of areas, including the complete DNS management, the improved system administration, and an extremely smart user interface that offers many new functions."
"For example, from a system-maintenance perspective, I really appreciate the self-repairing functions, authorization management, and software installation/distribution capabilities. The latter have been a major improvement in particular, since the options offered for distributing and removing programs to and from various users are enormous," says Nordlander. "The greatest gain may be that everything is working just as it is supposed to, from the operating system to e-mail and the Web," he added.
Working Even Better than Expected
One question that has to be asked is whether Nordlander had any doubts about installing a product that was not yet production-ready. "No, not once our tests showed that it was sufficiently stable and worked well. Because we have a 100-percent Microsoft environment, we have also gained a great deal in terms of integrating our operating system, office programs, e-mail, and Internet functions," says Nordlander. He continues: "The project itself has gone extremely well. In projects of this type some problems will always arise, but we have not run into a single problem that can be attributed to Windows 2000."
Software and Services
Windows® 2000 Server and Professional
Exchange Server 5.5
Office 2000
Outlook® 2000
